ROB THE VOTE

Here's how touchscreens killed Romney votes

You won't believe what machine expert claims

Bob Unruh joined WND in 2006 after nearly three decades with the Associated Press, as well as several Upper Midwest newspapers, where he covered everything from legislative battles and sports to tornadoes and homicidal survivalists. He is also a photographer whose scenic work has been used commercially.

A Chicago voting-machine tech is sounding the alarm, claiming he witnessed multiple error messages on the voting touch-screens this election – but only in cases where people voted for Mitt Romney.

Steve Pickrum said he worked for Chicago’s election system during the early voting and Election Day voting for the 2012 race.

As an equipment manager for the system, Pickrum said, he responded whenever there was a glitch with a voting machine.

“On early voting, when I did work on the floor when voters needed help using the equipment, I was able to see the preference of the voter, and every time that I saw [a] voter voted for Romney a ‘voter save failure’ message came up on the screen,'” he reported.

Then when he went on Election Day to cast his own vote, he picked Romney and experienced the same error message.

Pickrum said he worked at both the Matteson voting area as well as in Precinct 70, and although he discussed the anomalies with his boss, had not yet filed a formal report.

He said when he voted, he was told by a precinct worker to just go ahead and assume that his vote had been tabulated, despite the error message. But since he knew the operations of the machines, he asked the poll workers to check the vote report, and they found his vote had not been counted.

He insisted on completing his ballot on another machine, he told WND.

Curiously, he reported he never saw the error message when the voter was choosing Barack Obama.

Another poll worker, this one assigned at the University of Michigan, reported a list of irregularities, including that the precinct captain told her at one point, “You go sit down, you are bothering me,” when she was trying to observe the proceedings.

“I was only standing there and looking at voter documents,” she told WND. “It was clear that what bothered him was my very presence.”

She said a short time later a young man arrived and identified himself as a Democrat poll challenger.

“The first time he said anything was to object to my challenge of a voter. He tried to anger the voter by telling her, ‘She does not believe you are who you say you are.’ He was trying to create a scene. It then happened again, and I told him, ‘You are not here to challenge me!’ His reply was a very loud, ‘Yes I am! You are a Republican, and you are here to prevent people from voting. You are holding up the line and creating obstructions,'” she reported.

She told WND, in fact, no one waited more than about 15 minutes to vote the entire day, and there were no obstructions.

The balloting is unofficial until the Electoral College electors designated by each state meet Dec. 17 to cast their ballots.

Byron York of the Washington Examiner reports that some 200,000 fewer white voters were recorded in Ohio’s election this year than in 2008. “There are several theories about those missing white voters, but the most plausible is that the ones who were undecideds or weak Republicans were deeply influenced by Obama’s relentless attacks on Romney.”

And in Florida, the Sun Sentinel reported that election workers a week after the election said they found 963 unaccounted-for ballots – in a warehouse. “How can you lose them? This is terrible,” candidate Chickie Brandimarte told officials. Election supervisor Brenda Snipes, however, said it’s routine for various vote totals to be adjusted up until the Nov. 18 final certification.

Also in Florida, residents began demanding changes in the electoral system that handed voters chaos, frustration and delays at polling stations. The Florida League of Women Voters and other groups are demanding from Gov. Rick Scott a plan to draft reforms for the state’s elections.

WND reported just a day ago about an observer who noted up to 10 percent of the ballots cast at a polling station in Pennsylvania reverted to a default, which gave Barack Obama a vote no matter who the voter had selected.

With evidence mounting that the vote tabulation did not reflect the true choices of voters, talk-radio icon Rush Limbaugh echoed the Daily News, saying Monday: “Third-world, tin-horn dictators don’t get [these percentages]. I mean, the last guy that got this percentage of the vote was Saddam Hussein, and the people that didn’t vote for him got shot. This just doesn’t happen. Even Hugo Chavez [of Venezuela] doesn’t get 100 percent or 99 percent of the vote.”

It was in Upper Macungie Township, near Allentown, Pa., where an auditor, Robert Ashcroft, was dispatched by Republicans to monitor the vote on Election Day. He said the software he observed would “change the selection back to default – to Obama.”